


a promise you could never keep (Broken/Mending)

by passeridae



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Biting, Bottom Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison, M/M, Omnic Crisis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rough Sex, Top Reaper | Gabriel Reyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:08:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22197583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/passeridae/pseuds/passeridae
Summary: “Jack,” he greets, voice hoarse after a week of nothing but yelling commands and breathing in more dust than air. He drops his kit to the side of the door, ready to redeploy as soon as he’s told, puts his shotguns on the desk he’d commandeered to clean them between sorties. Jack’s standing, watching him. Assessing. Gabe lets him do his thing, starts stripping. Jack can do whatever, he doesn’t have the energy to worry about it. Right now, he’s taking a shower.
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 16
Kudos: 110
Collections: Bloody 76 Week





	a promise you could never keep (Broken/Mending)

The past week has been a shitshow, and stepping off a dropship into what looks like the middle of an upturned anthill is not helping Gabriel’s headache one bit. It feels almost like an omnic is doing its damned best to crush his head between a pincer, a sensation he has felt once before and would like to never experience again. The light of a weak sun reflects off the glass and metal (stupid, you’d think they’d learn it only takes one bomb to blow the windows out) and into his eyes, and he has to bite back a snarl at how it aches. With light still in the sky, HQ is always bustling, always full to bursting, and fresh from a hostile zone all the movement makes something in the back of his head screech in alarm. His eye twitches, along with his trigger fingers, and he checks his datapad once more to make sure he isn’t due to debrief until tomorrow. Good. Great. He has until 0800. Perhaps he can actually get his head on straight before then. 

He doesn’t waste time, moving off the tarmac and straight through the base to the room set aside for him. He doesn’t quite know the way by heart yet, but he’s getting there. Still got half a war for him to learn, assuming the front lines don’t change too much between now and then. He’s so jittery he feels like he’s about to shiver out of his skin — god, he fucking hates these first few hours back on base, where he’s still dialed up to eleven, pumped full of enough adrenaline to kill a lesser human. If they’d made him lock away his shotguns then he’s pretty sure he would have given in to his instincts and strangled someone by now. As is, they’re a solid weight against his back, grounding. Comforting. One of the few comforts he has, these days.

When he opens the door to his quarters, Jack’s waiting for him. Of fucking course he is. Jack’d got back yesterday, according to the notification he’d finally recieved en route back to base, unharmed, granted two weeks leave before redeployment. Nowhere near enough, but that was the Crisis for them. Not enough people for proper rotations anymore, even with conscription brought in. Nevertheless, Gabriel hadn’t expected him to be here. He’d’ve thought that Jack’d be off somewhere chatting with people on the base, putting up that disarming country boy façade, keeping a finger on the pulse of data coming in and out while he had a chance.

“Jack,” he greets, voice hoarse after a week of nothing but yelling commands and breathing in more dust than air. He drops his kit to the side of the door, ready to redeploy as soon as he’s told, puts his shotguns on the desk he’d commandeered to clean them between sorties. Jack’s standing, watching him. Assessing. Gabe lets him do his thing, starts stripping. Jack can do whatever, he doesn’t have the energy to worry about it. Right now, he’s taking a shower.

The hot water beats down on his aching muscles, fills his ears with static. The drain runs brown, then burgundy. Wounds have already healed, but dried blood always lingers on his skin. It catches in the hair on his chest as he scrubs it off, small, sharp pains as it tugs away. The silence of the room, the relaxing of his tensed muscles, it gives memories enough space to crowd in. And crowd they do. _Please, you have to help us, sir, my child, my wife, my family, how could you how could you, monster monster mons—_

Jack’s in the room. 

The bathroom is tiny, barely big enough for Gabriel to squeeze in the shower, it definitely does not comfortably fit the both of them. The air is steamy, and warm, and Jack’s skin quickly starts to flush red. Gabriel feels trapped, Jack between him and the door, and adrenaline dumps back into his bloodstream. His fingertips prickle in the still air. “Done with your self flagellating yet?” Jack asks. His voice is flat, his eyes an icy blue, calculating, still half in the field himself. Picking the quickest path to the objective, only the objective here is Gabe. Gabriel knows that Jack’s goal in asking this question is to set him off, but finds that he doesn’t actually care. He’s tired, and angry, and Jack can take it.

“No, Jack, I’m not done. I’m fucking sick of being sent to cities too late to save civillians, of having to pry humans from the wreckage of their lives because they were collateral, of being thwarted at every turn when I try to actually do something to win this war rather than drag it out into attrition. I’m sick of slogging through mud and blood and shit just to find that the machines at the end of it kill half my men like it’s nothing. This whole goddamn thing is just slaughter after slaughter and I fucking hate it.”

Gabriel realises that he’s stalking towards Jack, who’s backed them out of the bathroom and towards the bed. He’s still dripping wet, the shower’s still running in the background. Or perhaps that sound is part of the ringing in his ears. He pushes Jack, who goes down easy, resting on his elbows to look up at Gabriel from the mattress. “Come on then, take it,” he goads. 

Gabriel does. In a moment, he’s on him, grabbing his wrists in a bruising grip, yanking him hard enough that Jack has to engage his shoulders so that they don’t dislocate. Jack watches him with a hawk’s gaze, sharp and aware, hikes his hips up so Gabriel can pull at his sweats. When Gabriel reaches behind Jack’s cock, he finds that he’s already slick and loose. “Whore,” he growls into Jack’s ear, low and intimate and rasping, bites at his lobe, at his neck, forgoes prep in order to push inside immediately. Jack tenses, then purposefully relaxes his muscles, breathes through the pain. Gabriel struggles not to categorise the information as he would in an interrogation, welcomes the way that Jack bites hard into the cords of his neck to distract him. Focuses on the sharp pain of teeth, on his hand tight around Jack’s wrists, on the way that Jack is wet and tight and achingly hot inside.

When Jack releases his jaw, Gabriel takes it as permission to move. Short, sharp thrusts, pressing Jack down with his weight, his hip bones carving bruises into the backs of Jack’s thighs. Jack hisses, rolls his hips, arches into Gabriel with a snarl. He’d gone soft while Gabriel had been settling inside him, but soon hardens again at the friction of their movement, at Gabriel’s glancing blows to his prostate. Gabriel’s own pleasure rises slow and insidious, thorny as it curls its way through his abdomen in a tangle of _achehotfuckfuckfuck_. Jack locks his ankles behind Gabriel’s back, presses them even closer together, gasps close and soft and broken in Gabriel’s ear. 

He curls over as he orgasms, somewhere between ecstacy and agony, pressing his damp forehead against Jack’s as he pants. His hair’s long enough that it’s started to curl again, the colour of it striking against how incredibly pale Jack is. The colour of fresh bone, with a blushing patina of blood. Gabriel catches his breath, then pulls out, wincing at the chill of the air, and settles down half over Jack’s form. Lets Jack rut against his thigh, wrists still held in a tight grip above his head as he writhes. As he comes, his teeth close over Gabriel’s clavicle hard enough to draw blood. Gabriel wonders, absently, what sound he was trying to silence.

Afterwards, they lie in a tangle of limbs, half dozing. Gabriel has his arm around Jack, resting along his ribs, and Jack has his head under Gabriel’s chin, hair tickling at the skin. Jack’s wrists are circled with dark black rings of bruising, tucked under the pillow. They’re sticky, cooling rapidly in the recirculated air as the sweat dries on their skin. They’re definitely going to need to wash after this. The shower is still running in the bathroom, but neither of them get up to turn it off. Jack makes a humming noise in the back of his throat, nuzzling his nose against Gabriel’s neck. When he eventually speaks, the vibrations run along Gabriel’s skin. “You’re like a fire, you know. Burning hot with anger at every horror you come across. I’ve never met someone like that before.”

Gabriel makes a vague noise in response, petting down Jack’s side. He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Eventually, Jack’s breathing starts to slow, to even out as he relaxes fully. This is likely the first time he’s let himself rest since they parted ten days ago. He’s like a clockwork man, sometimes, always pressing onwards even when he should have already broken from the strain. It’s the farmer in him, Jack claims. He has to keep working while there’s work to be done — it’s not like nature lets you take a day off. Nor do omnics.

Once he’s fairly sure Jack’s asleep, Gabriel sighs, closing his eyes so he doesn’t have to stare at the white panels of the ceiling. He’s still patting down Jack’s ribs, stroke, stroke, stroke. It’s grounding. Something soft, one of the very few soft things they allow themselves. Something they can take for their own, in times like this. When Gabriel does talk, it’s in a whisper, like he’s once again a child again at confession. 

“If I’m a fire, then you’re a sinkhole Jack. You drink down all the pain around you, letting it drip into your soul until it can’t be seen from the surface anymore. But the water rises all the same with each horror you hide. How high’s the water now, hm? your thighs? Your chest? Your mouth? What’ll you do when it swallows you up?”

Jack’s laughter is startling. Gabriel tenses, nails digging into Jack’s side as he once again forcibly resists the urge to lash out. Jack’s eyes are open, and they are so so blue. Blue like drowning. His lips are curled into something amused as he says, “Don’t worry Gabe, it won’t, I won’t let it. I’ll just keep swimming. Keep going until I can’t anymore. It’s what I do best, after all.”

Gabriel releases a sound that could almost be a laugh, but it utterly mirthless. “Oh, I don’t doubt that. But I do wonder what the world will do to you first.”

Jack makes a face at him, annoyed, then rolls his eyes and kisses him. He tastes like stale coffee, presses himself into Gabriel like he can steal the words from his mouth. When Jack rolls them over, Gabriel lets himself be tossed, slides both hands down to grab at Jack’s ass, urges him higher and closer. Grasps, like Jack is, at anything to make them feel _human,_ rather than a small cog in a large machine. Lets Jack distract him, distract them both. They can talk later.


End file.
